Ruth Wills: 

Legendary Latin Teacher

Ruth Wills was a scholarly woman whose advanced Latin students often excelled statewide. The five-foot-tall teacher was also tough: She had no problem grabbing a hulking, misbehaving football player and dragging him to the principal’s office.

“When Ruth let you have both barrels, it didn’t matter if you were a 245-pound tackle on the football team, you quaked,” recalled a former colleague, Dirk Bollenback, former chairman of the Social Studies Department. 

“She was a very, very special person,” added Bollenback. “I never met anyone on the Ridgefield High School staff who didn’t have the highest respect for Ruth Wills.”

Ruth Ella Wills was born in Monson, Mass., in 1897. She graduated from Colby College in 1920 and that September, came to Ridgefield’s Hamilton High School a few years after the town’s first secondary school had opened. The two-story frame building stood on Bailey Avenue where  there’s now a municipal parking lot. When the school moved to East Ridge and took the name Ridgefield High School, Wills continued to work there until her retirement in 1965.

Over her 45-year career, she taught Latin, French, German, and English. In later years, however, she taught only Latin. “Year after year her advanced students would score the highest in the state of Connecticut in the Latin Achievement tests,” Bollenback said.

She was famous as a strict disciplinarian. Although diminutive in size, Wills “scared some of the biggest guys in Ridgefield,” recalled Town Clerk Barbara Serfilippi, a 1960 graduate of the high school. “She was a little lady but, boy, you didn’t mess with her."
Despite that reputation for discipline, she was also known for her quiet sense of humor. Among her favorite stories was one about a Latin II test in which her student, in answer to a question about the second periphrastic conjugation, wrote, “This construction is known as the second pair of elastics.” 

Wills was a woman of many interests. She spoke several languages fluently, followed foreign affairs closely, collected antique foreign coins, knitted, did crossword puzzles, read extensively, and was an avid fan of the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and  — in their day — the Brooklyn Dodgers. She also surprised many ex-students by being sighted at the old Danbury fairgrounds race track  — she was an avid fan of midget class auto racing. 

When, in a 1954 interview, Wills was asked what she liked most about teaching, she replied in one sentence: “It is very gratifying to know that perhaps in some small way I have been able to help various students to attain and achieve their goal toward a happy, democratic way of life.”

Her work and her interests couldn’t have hurt her health: When she died in 2000 (the same day as her longtime colleague Linda Davies), she was 102 years old.

Paul Baker: 

Multi-media Man of Words

Paul Baker was a remarkably versatile man of many media. He was best known as a radio broadcaster but was also a local TV personality as well as the voice of the Danbury Racearena, the stock-car track at the old Danbury Fairgrounds (now the mall).

His deep, rich voice was readily recognized, whether it was coming out of a radio, a TV set, or a public address system.

Born Paul V. Baldaserini in 1920 in Ridgefield, he grew up in town and graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1937 at the age of 16.

His distinctive voice was probably a factor in his entering radio, but his career began with a different kind of broadcasting. Mr. Baker was an air traffic controller in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and later, in the Korean War.

While stationed at an air base in Belim, Brazil, during World War II, he met a fellow airman who’d been a well-known West Coast radio announcer, and who was working at the Armed Forces Radio Service station in Belim. (AFRS provided news and entertainment to American troops.)

Recognizing Baker’s potential on-the-air talent, the friend invited him to do shows at the AFRS station in his spare time.

After  Baker returned to civilian life, he decided he wanted to write. He approached Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Nash in 1947 and got a job as a reporter.

However, his AFRS experiences in Brazil had sparked a fascination with radio so that when an opening occurred at WLAD in Danbury, he grabbed it. 

His military experience also inspired his “new” name. When he arrived at WLAD, “the program director asked me what name I was going to use on the air — since I was going on in about five minutes,” he said in an interview. “Since I had dealt with code in the service — it was A-Able, B-Baker, etc. — I said I’d use Baker for now.” And it was Baker ever after.

He was both a newsman and an announcer, and for many years his morning show was probably the most listened to radio program in the Danbury area. 

In 1977, he and Abe Najamy took over local cable TV Channel 10, and among other things, produced the only local TV news show ever devoted to this area.

Among the people who got their start in TV during the Baker years at Channel 10 were Ridgefielder Chip Dean, now an ESPN director, and Paul’s own son, Joe, another director at ESPN.

After leaving WLAD, Baker had a weekly interview show on WREF in Ridgefield.

Baker, who had lived in Southbury for many years, served as toastmaster for many area functions, mostly charitable in nature, and was a member of many clubs and organizations. He had a 24-year association with the Southern New York Racing Association — on countless Saturdays in summer, he was the announcer at the stock car races at the Danbury Fair grounds, now the Danbury Fair Mall.

A longtime sports enthusiast, he was a founding member of the Danbury and Ridgefield Old Timers Associations. As a golfer, he carded four holes-in-one — his last at the age of 90.

But for all his vocal and athletic talents, Paul Baker never forgot his first love — writing. Late in life, he produced four books, as well as countless newspaper columns, all focusing on a local history and personalities of the past.

“I would rather write  ... than do all the broadcasting in the world,” he said in 1999.

He died in 2014 at the age of 94.